Article ID: CBB001022463

Thomas Hardy, Provincial Geology and the Material Imagination (2008)

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Buckland, Adelene (Author)


19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
Volume: 6
Pages: Approx. 8,600 words


Publication Date: 2008
Edition Details: Part of a special issue, “Victorian Fiction and the Material Imagination”. http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/index.php/19/article/view/469 (Accessed March 21, 2011).
Language: English

This essay explores the nineteenth-century traffic and exchange of fossils and natural-historical objects between province and metropolis as represented by two very different geological writers of the period, the fossil collector Gideon Mantell and the novelist Thomas Hardy. The men are connected through Mantell's The Wonders of Geology, the sixth edition of which (1848) Hardy read and utilised for his descriptions of the geological past in his third novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873). These two texts demonstrate a powerful investment in determining the meaning of the geological object according to the social and geographical spaces in which it is discovered, displayed, and discussed, so that the scientific object becomes the site around which complex cultural politics coalesce and sit in tension. In its consideration of the relationship between place and meaning in science, and in its focus on scientific material culture, this essay attempts to disrupt the current spotlight on the interrelationships between scientific law and narrative pattern in Victorian literary studies. Instead, it hopes to contribute to a discussion of the ways in which the novel's attention to scientific objects rather than narratives made it an important site of epistemological enquiry into the basis of scientific knowledge and the inseparability of that knowledge from the discourses and spaces which produced it.

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Description On the 19th-century exchange of fossils and natural-historical objects as represented by the fossil collector Gideon Mantell and the novelist Thomas Hardy.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001022463/

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Authors & Contributors
Henchman, Anna Alexandra
Coccaro, Adam
Dawson, Gowan
Fisher, Philip
Freeman, Michael J.
Grigson, Caroline
Journals
Victorian Studies
British Journal for the History of Science
Modernism/Modernity
Review of English Studies
Victorian Literature and Culture
Journal for the History of Knowledge
Publishers
Harvard University
Oxford University Press
University of Missouri
Cambridge University Press
New York University
University of Massachusetts Press
Concepts
Science and literature
Natural history
Collectors and collecting
Fossils
Astronomy
Paleontology
People
Hardy, Thomas
Eliot, George
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord
Blind, Mathilde
Collins, Wilkie
Darwin, Charles Robert
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
18th century
Early modern
Places
Great Britain
Ireland
Latin America
Spain
United States
Peru
Institutions
Hunterian Museum (London)
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